


The Touches of Gods

by CurrieBelle



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU - The Bad Guys Win, Amputation, F/M, Seriously this one is graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 15:51:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6246103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurrieBelle/pseuds/CurrieBelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"To attune to the Hand of Vecna, you must lop off your left hand at the wrist and then press the artifact against the stump. The hand grafts itself to your arm and becomes a functioning appendage. if the hand is ever removed, you die."</p><p>(Dungeon Master's Guide, Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition)</p><p>For Susanah Grace on Twitter; this scene was her creation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Touches of Gods

Delilah placed her shaking hands on the stone altar, gazing down at the artifact framed between them. The Hand was shriveled and brown. The skin gripped the bone; the nails were long, yellow and brittle. It lay flat, palm down, fingers spread, as if it were covering something - a word in a secret book, perhaps, or the innocuous token of a magic trick. The stone dais on which it sat, square like a dinner table and entirely unmarked, rested in the middle of a darkened vault. The arcane etchings on the wall, the ceiling, and the floor were complex, and even the protective sigils on the door were elaborate; but the Hand rested on a naked platform, as mundane in appearance as any other decaying pound of flesh.

Yet no fool could stand where Delilah stood think it benign. It _suffocated_ her with the weight of its presence; it held the very air in submission. Looking at it - at its gnarled fingers - she felt as if it had somehow seized her by the throat without moving at all.

She glanced over at her own left hand – pale and thin, not inelegant, but not special. Her body, as with her magic, was only a tool of her mind. If the tool had grown obsolete, she would replace it.

Then she looked up at Sylas, who leaned against the opposite side of the altar, bracing his broad palms against the stonework. She’d always liked his hands. He gave his affections with them freely, readily, and she thrilled at the thought of their bold, sudden touches. Hard and cool as steel, and just as uncompromising. Delilah watched his fingers drum down on the stone, and knew why she needed him here. Calling their task a ritual was misleading. It was an arcane surgery, bordering on butchery. She needed his touch for it - she needed to be seized, etherized, cut apart and reassembled by the only man both strong and gentle enough to do it.

(When she first told him what the ritual would entail, he did not cry - he never cried anymore - but he had bound her tight in his arms through the whole night, begging her just to thread her hands in his hair, to grant him all the touches he thought he might miss. Very few things belonged to them alone anymore - The Whispered One influenced so, so much - but that night had been theirs, their secret.)

Sylas sensed her drifting thoughts. He met her gaze, and held it, uncannily still; that was a gift from death, that understanding of stillness. He stood with a solemnity befitting the situation, his posture and his loyalty unwavering.

“It is an incredible honour,” she said. “I should be more grateful.”

Sylas reached across the altar, above the artifact, and placed his hand over hers. She drew a shaky breath, ashamed.  “Grateful, yes,” he said. “But you are permitted some fear as well, my dear.”

Delilah looked down at the Hand once more. She had known fear before. She had crushed a creased letter emblazoned with the words  _Lord Sylas Briarwood has passed away_ under her heel. She had touched his emptied body on a barren altar, and had felt herself eviscerated by his absence, gutted until she was hollow and cold.

Damn her fears. She could survive anything. Anything but  _that_ , for she was nearly certain she had not survived losing Sylas the first time.

“I will not turn from his gift," she reassured him. "I only need a moment to gather myself.”

Her husband gave a proud smile. He rounded the table, cradled her face in his hands, and kissed her forehead, murmuring “There’s my brave girl,” into her skin. The gesture turned her away from the altar, towards him, so she faced the familiar fur and thick, black fabric of his overcoat. She smiled. His thumb traced over her lips, as if it liked that shape.

The moment he started to pull away, Delilah seized his sleeves, and stopped his flight short. She whispered, still smiling faintly, “I want you to do it.”

Silence, and then a sigh, ghosting through her hair. He rested his chin on her head, pulled her tighter, and mumbled, “I know.”

He didn’t move, long enough that Delilah tentatively pulled at the fabric gripped in her fingers, tugging like a child with a question. “Are you the one in doubt now, my love?”

“I loathe the idea of hurting you again.”

_Again._

Delilah drew back. Sylas never resisted her; that monstrous strength was hers to pull with the ease of puppet strings. Sternly, she reminded him, “You broke my heart last time. This will heal much faster.”

He looked stung, but he already knew she would never forgive him for dying.

“Once you do it,” she instructed, her voice shaking, “throw it away. I cannot see it after it is gone.”

“I understand,” he said. He took her left hand in his, as decisive as ever, and raised it between them. A slightly devilish smirk came onto his features, and he buttressed his thumb up to the jewel of her engagement ring. “I’m assuming you’ll keep this part, at least?”

Delilah was appalled, and nearly snatched her hand away. “Sylas, don’t be vile!”

His smirk grew wide - wide enough that she could see the points of his fangs just barely pricking the flesh of his lower lip. Of course, he was only teasing. With a gentle reminder, in his low, rumbling baritone, dark as thunder but so much smoother - “I adore you, you madwoman" - he slipped the ring from her finger. Her hand felt suddenly light and naked, as if she had already been stripped of the limb. He gave her the band, and the metal was warm. She nearly rested it upon the altar, but thought the better of it; she slipped it instead into Sylas’s breast pocket.

Then she stepped away from him, and dusted off her hands, her skirts, trying to find things to do to make ready. "Take up your sword, my knight," she said - and her voice wavered like she was ill, so that her own joking seemed fragile. Oh, she hated this - she hated not being as indomitable as Sylas. She hated being weak.

Perhaps her failed delivery was why he took the address so seriously. At her words, he nodded, and drew Craven Edge. He held it aloft, pointed downwards, with both hands. With a chilling glare into its scarlet eye, he growled, “You are about to draw blood from the most precious creature living in this world. You  _will_ be respectful or I will abandon you here. Understood?”

Silence, of course: But she imagined Craven Edge offered a tolerable response, because Sylas swung the sword back down and said no more. Delilah pushed her sleeve up to her elbow, and reached forward - but Sylas caught her hand before she could press it to the altar.

Delilah froze, and looked at him, incredulous. He held her gaze. She shook, but he was steady. Sylas raised her left hand to his lips. He shut his eyes, and kissed her knuckles. The gesture was slow, deliberate, almost reverent in its intensity. With a guiding, gentle push of his thumb, he uncurled her fingers and pressed kisses to their inner curves. She trailed a touch across his mouth as each one passed, thankful beyond words that this was among the last things those naked, shuddering nerves would feel. With every touch of his lips, he enchanted her, carrying her further and further away. There was no ziggurat, no Vecna, no Whitestone, no ritual – they were a thousand miles from themselves, holding each other under the silver moon in Wildmount, young and warm and unfettered, and already painfully, poisonously in love.

Lastly, he kissed her palm, and she cradled his cheek. Into her hand, he whispered of their most sacred secret: “I will not forget the touch that gave me life again.”

Her trembling ceased. He looked down at her - and whatever warmth his body had lost remained in his eyes, a warmth both dark and deep. Her heart quit its thundering, and for a moment, she was peaceful as death. She said, “Please be quick.”

“I shall,” he promised.

She pulled herself from his grasp and slammed her hand against the altar. Sylas's shoulder tensed at her side, and the black arc of his sword descended like a dragon’s wing, and - and the cracking bone and the sensation of her tendons shorn clean through and the sick bloody _sound_  - it all struck into her organs and she screamed before she could stop, over the ring of the sword rebounding from the stone. She squeezed her eyes shut, as if blindness could alleviate the agony, and heard the small, distant _thud_ of Sylas disposing of the severed limb. He was still there – she could feel his presence, strong and cool, and she could feel the tension in his heart. He would not move until she gave the word, but something bestial and protective in him ached to comfort her – his hand slowly wrung the grip of the sword - she heard the leather twisting.

Panting, she opened her eyes. An arc of scarlet lay spattered across the altar, and she saw the fingers of the shriveled Hand twitch, sensing a fresh wound. The suffocating magic in the chamber pulsed, so abrupt and greedy that she gagged as it washed over her, and she felt Sylas shiver. She raked the Hand towards her – her knees gave from the pain – and then with a clatter of fallen steel, Sylas gripped her shoulders, steadying her. Stifling a frantic sob, she bit her lip and forced the Hand of Vecna onto the stump of her wrist. The fresh-cut veins knit together with the ancient flesh – the bones snapped into alignment – and it felt as if she were sinking through water, slow and soothing, and she realized Sylas had caught her and was holding her curled to his chest.

And that realization dulled her agony until another, new sensation cut through her – a growing tidal wave of power, neither painful nor pleasurable, but simply expansive, overwhelming, grander than she could ever hope to understand. She could only breathe, and barely even that, and for a painful, endless minute her awareness of the world outside vanished. All she felt was the slow seep of might flooding her veins, the frigid fingers of Vecna himself curling around her heart, connecting her to him vitally – and then the torrent settled inside her. She pulsed, she trembled - she felt grand, and deadly, and beyond death.

And thus the Hand was hers, one with her - cold and strong.

Delilah opened her eyes. She saw the distant ceiling of the temple above, and all the secret symbols upon it. They spoke to her, and so few others. Her head rested on Sylas’s chest – and of course, there was no heartbeat beneath her, but she found his stillness more comforting. He would not waver – he would never, not for the rest of his eternal life.

She was the luckiest woman in the world.

As she rested, and regained her senses, Sylas's arms bound her close to him. One circled around her back and one under her thighs. She was, for all her newfound might, a blissful captive. Sylas had taken a seat on the floor, his back to the stone altar, and pulled her into his lap. He kissed her hair, and whispered something into it, a strained, desperate plea – “Delilah - Delilah? My darling, my lily – say you’re alright – please, let me hear your voice –“

Poor, frightened fool! Whose faith had truly wavered in the end? With a shaking smile, she replied, “Sylas, dear, I feel – I feel wonderful.”

She let her head fall back, so she could gaze up at him. His terror faded, slowly, and he relaxed into a smile of relief and heartfelt pride. Delilah took his handsome, grinning face in both of her hands–

And then she froze, her heart twisting at the vile appendage emerging from her blood-spattered sleeve. It was _hideous._ Panicking, she retracted it. The Hand moved when she willed it to – but it didn’t feel like hers – it didn't look - it wasn’t right - the fingers were too long, the skin decayed – and for a moment, she thought she would be sick –

But Sylas grasped the Hand, and held it to his cheek. “No, no,” he breathed. “It is your touch. I would never shy away.”

Delilah stared at him, moved. She nodded, and shut her eyes. She let him kiss her - slow, and long, and soothing, before she turned away, pressing her face into his fur collar and breathing deep. They rested there together for an endless portion of their endless time, silent, but for the sound of her steadying breaths and the slow drip of her blood from the altar.

 


End file.
